Illinois' method for measuring student poverty raises count statewide

April 24, 2013|By Diane Rado, Chicago Tribune reporter

(Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

In the federal government's view, an estimated 1,339 poor schoolchildren live within the affluent Arlington Heights-based School District 59. But the state counted 3,536 poor students when it doled out a "poverty grant" to the district this school year.

Across Illinois, the state counted some 1 million low-income students — more than twice the federal numbers — in calculating poverty payments to districts, a Tribune review of school finance data shows.

The more low-income children, the more poverty funding districts get. And the state's use of an unusual and little-understood formula that liberally counts children as disadvantaged when they are enrolled in various social service programs has spurred a sharp rise in low-income students, the newspaper's analysis shows.

Those numbers, in turn, have prompted skyrocketing poverty grant expenditures totaling nearly $10 billion over the past decade — money that also goes to the wealthiest school districts in the state, including Arlington Heights-based District 59.

"We really do have a lot of poor kids," said Assistant Superintendent Ruth Gloede, whose district received a $4.4 million poverty grant this year.

The struggle for money during the state's fiscal crisis has spurred questions and criticism about how the poverty funding is distributed and which districts should get first claim. Of chief concern is that, with so many more kids defined as low-income, the poverty grants are accounting for an increasingly larger chunk of overall state education aid.

That general state aid is designed to distribute money equitably and help districts that have lower property values and fewer local tax dollars to support their schools.

The "general state aid" for public schools is calculated at $4.8 billion this year. About $1.8 billion goes toward poverty grants, about 37 percent of the total, up from about 12 percent a decade ago, records show.

The Tribune analysis of state data showed that:

•Chicago suburban districts have seen the greatest gains in low-income students and poverty funding. So have many affluent districts scattered across the state.In fact, the 72 most property-rich districts in Illinois — the majority of them in the Chicago area — received $22 million in poverty grants, according to state data.

•Some well-off districts with small but rising numbers of low-income kids did not qualify for grants before but now receive poverty money. More than 100 of those districts, in communities including Kenilworth, Winnetka, Wilmette and Lake Forest, received grants this year, even though some already spend more than $20,000 per pupil.

•At the same time, Chicago Public Schools' share of the poverty money has declined, while still representing $796 million of the roughly $1.8 billion in poverty grants offered this year. Two dozen of the state's most impoverished districts also saw drops in poverty funding.

Among those poorer districts is south Cook County's Gen. George Patton School District 133 in Riverdale, where enrollment has declined, lowering the poverty grant to about $1.1 million compared with a peak of $1.5 million over the last few years.

"How can you justify taking money from this district when we have so little?'' Patton Superintendent Frankie Sutherland said.

Calculating poverty

Over the last decade,the state implemented a formula that counts low-income children enrolled in social service programs for needy families, including Medicaid, children's health insurance and food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Numbers in some of those programs have ballooned, in part because families can enroll and still have income above federal poverty levels.

For example, the base poverty level for a family of four this school year is about $23,000 under federal guidelines. But income eligibility for a children's heath care program — used in the state's low-income count — can be twice that, about $46,000.

lllinois' low-income population at schools spiked after the state began using so-called DHS or Department of Human Services counts, from 508,600 to almost 1.1 million between 2001 and 2011.

In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau data on poverty in school districts — used to provide federal poverty money to states — estimates 443,000 children ages 5 to 17 living in poverty in Illinois, a figure that includes both public and private school students.

The state's figure eclipses even the number of students eligible for free and reduced-price meals at Illinois schools — a measure that most states use to determine how much poverty money should be handed out, said Michael Griffith, a senior policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based research and policy group.

Griffith said he doesn't know of any other state that uses Illinois' array of social service programs to count low-income children, in part because collecting that data has been a challenge.